The death toll from Monday’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria passed 21,700 and is expected to rise throughout the day as rescue workers continue their search through the rubble.
State Department officials said Thursday the Chinese surveillance balloon that flew over the U.S. earlier this month carried multiple antennas to collect signals intelligence—like communications and geolocation data—as part of a larger surveillance program targeting more than 40 countries on five continents. The Defense Intelligence Agency was reportedly aware of the balloon the day before it entered U.S. airspace but didn’t flag it as an urgent threat, instead moving to collect intelligence on it. The House of Representatives voted unanimously Thursday to condemn China for the incursion.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Thursday Nicaragua has released 222 political prisoners—including one U.S. citizen—who arrived in the United States yesterday morning. Blinken said Nicaragua freed the prisoners unilaterally, without U.S. concessions or inducements, suggesting President Daniel Ortega’s administration—known for its repressive tactics and close ties to Russia—may be interested in improving relations with the United States.
Special Counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence as part of an investigation into former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, ABC News reported last night. The subpoena—which compels the former vice president to provide relevant documents and testimony—is the result of months of negotiations between federal prosecutors and Pence’s lawyers. Former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien also received a subpoena as part of the probe.
Meta reinstated Trump’s Instagram and Facebook accounts Thursday, ending his suspension for praising people involved in violence during the January 6 Capitol riot. Trump has not yet posted on either of the two social media platforms, and also has yet to post on Twitter, which restored his access in November.
Newly-elected Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was hospitalized Wednesday evening after feeling lightheaded at a retreat with other Senate Democrats. Fetterman—who suffered a stroke while on the campaign trail in May—remains in the hospital, though doctors have ruled out another stroke.
Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was named NFL MVP on Thursday, his second time winning the award in his six-year career. Minnesota Vikings receiver Justin Jefferson won Offensive Player of the Year, San Francisco 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa won Defensive Player, and Brian Daboll of the New York Giants won Coach of the Year.
Entitlement Reform Debates Resume
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) during a news conference to discuss the ongoing negotiations over the national debt ceiling. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Remember Tuesday? Us neither. For reference: President Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address that evening and received a lot of boos and shouts of “liar” when he suggested some Republicans—“I’m not saying it’s a majority”—want to cut Medicare or Social Security in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.
Republicans really hate this line of attack—and the French protests over modest pension reforms we discussed last week might explain why. “The only people talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare right now are the Democrats using it as a scare tactic because they can’t defend their failed economic policies,” Nebraska Rep. Adrian Smith told The Dispatch on Thursday.
Biden and the Undocumented taking American worker jobs. Joey boy was in Wisconsin talking about his job creation. Creation for who?
Data published in the New York Times shows that the Biden administration is aiding employers by adding millions of foreign workers to the labor force — ensuring wages stay stagnant — even as native-born Americans struggle to get back into jobs since the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
“The foreign-born workforce grew much more quickly than the U.S.-born workforce, Labor Department figures show,” the Timesreports:
“When the unemployment rate goes down, you would normally expect wage inflation to go up, but that’s not what’s happening,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management. “So there must be something else moving in the labor force, and there is a very likely explanation here that immigrants are coming in and taking jobs.” [Emphasis added]
But despite the resurgence in the foreign-born labor force — about four-fifths of it are people legally allowed to work in the United States, by one calculation — there are bottlenecks. [Emphasis added]
Chart via New York Times
“What the Democrats have never explained is … how working families are helped by flooding the labor market with cheap illegal labor,” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) said last week during a congressional hearing.
EXCLUSIVE: Stunning new data pulled from the Medicare database shows how each shot increases your risk of death
We can now see very clearly what is going on. Shot #1 bumps your risk of death by around 20%. Shot # 2 bumps it another 20%. Shot #3 bumps your risk another 10%.
I’m still gathering data from Medicare, but a consistent picture is emerging for Medicare participants under 80 years old:
Shot #1 increases your risk of death by around 20% with an exponential time constant of around 150 days.
Shot #2 increases your risk of death by an additional 20% with a time constant of around 100 days.
Shot #3 increases your risk of death by an additional 10% with a time constant of around 50 days.
Due to the limitations of the Medicare data (missing vaccination data on nearly half the records), it’s not clear whether the shots reduce your risk of death from COVID. We need data that the public health authorities refuse to provide. If the shots worked, they’d want to make this data public. Keeping the data under wraps suggests that the shots not only make you more likely to die from all causes, but they also make you more likely to die from COVID.
The data
Here’s the data. I’ll explain more in the next section.
About the data
This is Medicare death data for those under 80 years old pulled from all 50 states.
The graphs are deaths after vaccine shot #N by day. So an x-axis value of100 means you died 100 days after you got that shot # and the vertical axis is the count of deaths at that time distance from that shot number.
The charts count all people who were vaccinated with the specific shot number sometime in 2021.
The effects of COVID spikes are smoothed out here due to the time window of the vaccine shots being spread so there aren’t “peaks” due to COVID outbreaks.
Since most older people were given their first vaccines in Q1 of 2021, there is a small seasonal spike around 300 days after the shots because older people die more often in the winter. That spike may also be from the COVID death surge in Jan 2022.
My interpretation of the results
My interpretation of the data above is based not just on this data, but extensive analysis of the Medicare data that I’ve done that is not described here.
Here’s what I believe is happening:
In the first 20 days or so, we have a healthy vaccinee effect operating, i.e., they don’t inject people who they believe are about to die. That’s the big slope at the start with a short time constant of around 8 days. Death counts are also low because of a startup effect where if they inject you, and you are seriously injured, they’ll try to keep you alive before they give up and you’re officially dead. So after around 20 days, we’re at the “baseline” normal death rate.
The drug starts working on you making you more and more likely to die over time starting from when you are injected. For the first dose, it looks like a time constant of around 150 days with a final value of around 20% above baseline death rate (without the vaccine). For shot #2, it seems to be a shorter time constant (around 100 days), and an endpoint 20% higher. So for the two shots combined, you are raising your risk of death by around 40%. The third shot acts faster to raise your risk of dying, but the endpoint is only around 10% above your previous baseline. So after your third shot, if you are old, you’ve raised your risk of death by around 50%.
While these numbers seem impossibly high, consider that I know of a geriatric practice with 1,000 patients where the death rate was 11 deaths a year and in 2022, they had 39 deaths. They attribute all of the excess deaths to the vaccine. A funeral service in California that I recently talked to doubled his business in 2022. And many embalmers report 40% or more of their cases have these mystery clots. I know of a nursing home in Australia where the death rate went from 2% per year to over 20% in the 12 months after the vaccines rolled out. So I find it puzzling that the death numbers in the US appear to only be up by less than 20%.
The drop offs you see in the charts after 360 days is because the time window of the shots is 1 year and we only looked at deaths till the end of 2022. Thus, we simply run out of time. The graphs limit you to vaccination in 2021 meaning ONLY the first 365 days are going to be “flat.”
Pro-vaxers could argue these graphs by claiming, “Oh look, the vaccines save you from dying for a year and then they wear off.” I’ve explored that and it’s not true. COVID kills in waves and when we restrict the vax window we look at, we can see the COVID peaks on top of the graph. Whether or not those peaks might have been higher if the person wasn’t vaccinated is something we can see if we can get the full dataset of who was vaccinated and who wasn’t so we can compare the peaks of vaccinated people with the peaks of unvaccinated people. That will tell us if there is any benefit to the vaccines at all; I wouldn’t be surprised if the peaks are higher for the vaxxed than the unvaxxed.
Have you looked at the excess deaths in the US lately?
The fact that 2021 and 2022 were excess death years suggests our main intervention made things worse, not better. And the 2022 numbers are incomplete according to the CDC. This is very unusual for excess deaths to be up like this. Usually, when you have a year with excess deaths, it is followed by a year of deficit deaths due to the depletion effect. This suggests something is at work that is killing people and it is not COVID. Hmmmm… wonder what it could be???? Hmmmm… gotta think about that one.
Summary
The shots increase your risk of death with every shot you take. The COVID vaccines aren’t safe for anyone.
It remains troubling to me why the authorities don’t release the data so everyone can see what is going on.
The only reason for keeping people in the dark about the COVID death/vax data is if the numbers would make the medical medical community look inept for supporting the vaccination program.
Mark my words: they will not be able to keep hiding the data.
When the data is finally set free, the entire medical community will be discredited, along with Congress, the White House, the mainstream media, high tech companies that continue to censor doctors trying to spread the truth, public health officials all over the world, and numerous State leaders, lawmakers, companies, universities, and organizations that required these vaccines in order to participate in society or keep a job.
World leaders should be listening to the people they are censoring and ignoring the people they are listening to.
Everyone has been doing a fact check on Biden’s comments Tuesday. I think that being Joe was telling one lie after another it should be called a lie check. So here goes.
Biden said, “In the ten years the ban was law, mass shootings went down. After we let it expire, in a Republican administration, mass shootings tripled.”
The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth. Doesn’t look like it tripled to me.
President Joe Biden claimed during Tuesday’s State of the Union that the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act put a monthly cap 0f $35 on insulin costs for Medicare enrollees.
VERDICT: Misleading. But former President Donald Trump’s administration actually struck a deal with insulin manufacturers and healthcare providers to drastically reduce the cost of insulin for American seniors who relied on Medicare during his presidency — and before Biden took office. The deal Trump’s administration made limited the co-pay for a month’s supply of the drug to $35, as Breitbart News reported at the time.
In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion – the largest deficit reduction in American history.
Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, wrote in September that Biden’s actions will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits from 2021 through 2031, or $2.5 trillion if you don’t count the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill of 2021.
Nearly 25% of the entire national debt, a debt that took 200 years to accumulate, was added by just one administration alone – the last one.
It’s important to note, though, that some of the increase in the debt during the Trump era was because of the trillions in emergency Covid-19 pandemic reliefspending that passed with bipartisan support. The national debt spiked in the first half of 2020 after increasing gradually during Trump’s first three years in office, and because of spending required by safety-net programs that were created by previous presidents. A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors.
Here at home, gas prices are down $1.50 since their peak.
As of the day of the State of the Union, the national average for a gallon of regular gas was $3.457, per data from the American Automobile Association. That was indeed down more than $1.50 from a record high of $5.016 in mid-June. But it was still up from a national average of $2.393 on Biden’s Inauguration Day in January 2021.
Biden claimed 12 million new jobs. Department of Labor statistics says 2.5 million. All the other jobs were layoffs that returned. Under Trump during the pandemic his last five months, 10 million workers returned. No one claimed those were new jobs. Another way to look at it.
Under Trump 22 million lost Jobs. Joe Biden claims he created 12 million jobs. So can you say 10 million jobs gone for good under Biden?
“As a medical doctor and a scientist, I had no choice but to dare to take legal action.”
“Today, we filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government for cancellation of the administrative action,” announced Dr. Masanori Fukushima during a press conference on February 2, 2023. Because the Japanese Health Ministry refuses to acknowledge the causal link between vaccines and deaths, Professor Fukushima and a team of researchers said they “had no choice but to dare to take legal action.”
Masanori Fukushima is an infectious disease expert and Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University — with over 25 years of oncology experience. He has been hammering at the cracks in the vaccine narrative and publicly condemned Japan’s Ministry of Health late last year.
I have checked with a Japanese translator on the accuracy of the following text from the video translation, and he assessed it to be “actually pretty good.”
“Today, it is a matter of fundamental importance for the Japanese government to continuously collect and disclose accurate data,” Professor Fukushima expressed. “However, I have witnessed the recent fraud scandal committed by the Health Ministry.”
“I have come to realize that this is a historically serious problem that threatens the very existence of the nation of Japan,” he stressed. As a medical doctor and a scientist, I had no choice but to dare to take legal action.”
Dr. Fukushima continues, explaining the importance of honestly disclosing public health data.
“Needless to say, it is absolutely important to disclose real-world data on the efficacy and safety of the vaccination against the COVID-19 virus. This is because such data is directly linked to people’s healthcare, livelihood, and economy. Therefore, I believe that the Japanese government, that is, the Health Ministry, must disclose the data properly to the public.”
Professor Masanori Fukushima then breaks down some startling data. “Take a look at the data for 65-69 and 70-79 age groups,” he implored. “Surprisingly, the number of new infections or positive cases per 100,000 people is four times higher for people who have been vaccinated twice, compared to unvaccinated people.”
“Also, look at the data provided by the Advisory Board in September 2021,” he invited. “The fatality rate of the unvaccinated people and the fatality rates of the one-dose and two-dose vaccine people were described properly. According to the description in red, vaccination has indeed reduced the fatality rate for those over 65 years of age. However, for all ages, vaccination has demonstrated the opposite effect, causing higher fatality rates. This is a paradoxical phenomenon,” he asserted.
“As such, data on the fatality rates had already been published in official documents after all. However, in last year’s data, the Health Ministry deleted all that information,” Dr. Fukushima loathed.
“In fact, vaccination has been recommended based on the explanation that vaccination does not prevent infection, but vaccination prevents severe illness and reduces the mortality rate.” However,” Dr. Fukushima countered, “based on the data published by the Advisory Board in September 2021, the basis for recommending vaccination for all ages should no longer exist anymore. Despite the fact, the Health Ministry has pushed ahead with the vaccination.”
And as such, Professor Fukushima considers the situation to be “a serious national crisis.” “This is why I have decided to file a lawsuit against the government at this time.”
Biden says he will veto any cuts to Medicare, but yet he’s trying to cut Medicare Advantage. You may have heard him Tuesday night carrying on like a crazy person hollering and screaming about Republicans cutting Medicare and Social Security.
Well now we know who’s proposing the draconian cuts and trying to gut Medicare Advantage. Joe Biden. His boy Obama tried that and even the majority of Democrats had to remind him of his place.
Now the Biden Administration and Democrats Want to Cut Overwhelmingly Popular Medicare Advantage Program. A new report on Medicare shows that enrollment in the popular Medicare Advantage (MA) program has grown across the board, showing that more seniors are choosing privately-run, innovative options every year.
A group of progressive House lawmakers wrote to CMMI calling for it to get rid of the model for similar reasons.
Progressive lawmakers have also floated potential cuts to MA to help pay for expanded Medicare benefits such as dental or vision benefits as part of the Build Back Better Act, which has stalled in Congress due to objections from key centrist Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.
The Biden Administration itself is proposing major cuts to the Medicare Advantage program. It runs into the billions.
CMS’ final rate announcement will be released by April 4.
How stupid are these people? Of course more vaccinated are dying. Maybe because the vaccine doesn’t work like they thought it would? Not so long ago I thought I explained this, but I guess there a few folks who don’t get it.
Some on the left have two things they always say. Sure we’re getting COVID, but it’s mild and we’re not being hospitalized. That worked for some until August of 2022. More vaccinated than unvaccinated were dying from COVID. And more vaccinated than unvaccinated were being hospitalized. So now what?
Not to worry. The new slogan went something like this. Sure more vaccinated are being hospitalized and dying because more are vaccinated than unvaccinated. Does that work?
So the WHO, CDC, and the FDA claimed that the vaccination would prevent the death and hospitalizations less a few rare cases. But when more vaccinated are dying, getting sick, and being hospitalized, how was the vaccine beneficial for those folks? Remember the first claim. Vaccinated protects you from dying and getting hospitalized.
Don’t even get me started on the side effects the vaccinated are having.
Adrian Monck served for over a decade as one of Klaus Schwab’s top deputies.
Adrian Monck, the managing editor and comms director of WEF, announced the news in a LinkedIn post. Monck oversaw the WEF’s notorious Young Global Leaders and Global Shapers programs, which Schwab infamously bragged had helped the outfit to “penetrate the cabinets” of foreign governments.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its benefactors continue to face major headwinds, as a global resistance has formed against the organization’s advocacy for a two-tiered feudalistic society. What was once a shadowy-by-design network has been forced into the mainstream spotlight, and the blowback to the WEF was on display for the world to see in its 2023 Davos conference.
The WEF’s extremist agenda, which advances tyrannical, anti-human narratives such as “The Great Reset” and “Build Back Better,” among others, met several unexpected challenges at Davos through independent and non-institutional media operations.
One Japanese journalist even got a few questions in with Schwab, who was incredibly displeased with this impromptu interview attempt.
我那覇真子 Masako Ganaha @ganaha_masako
I encountered Klaus Schwab! And here is what happened. He is afraid of our resistance! @ WEF Davos2023
In the United States, several Republican members of Congress even backed out of Davos after The Dossier reported on their planned participation in the confab.
The Dossier
Abandon Ship: Republicans in U.S. WEF delegation reverse course on Davos trip
Monday marked the first day of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual confab in Davos, and the U.S. congressional to the ruling class gathering was noticeably slimmer than advertised.
274 likes · 105 comments · Jordan Schachtel
At Davos 2023, Monck cut a free promo for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to the expressed approval of the Chinese state media operations that were invited to the meeting.
Just weeks before its annual invite-only, closed-door gathering in Davos, Monck sought to mitigate the reputational damage to the WEF, churning out a series of articles claiming the outfit is the victim of “disinformation campaigns.”
In one such piece that was published in The Globe and Mail, Monck declares that “a Russian propaganda campaign” is to blame for people’s negative perception of the WEF.
“The intent was apparently to spread disinformation in a bid to stir far-right outrage about COVID-19 and perpetuate domestic extremism,” the retiring WEF comms chief rants. “The means was often via bots that would push far-right conspiracy theories to communities on boards such as 4chan.”
In calling for a global censorship and surveillance regime akin to the one installed by the Chinese government, Monck declared:
“The consequences of unabated misinformation are dangerous. Misinformation concerning COVID-19 and vaccines cost lives during the pandemic. The revelations around the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot reveal how false information about elections can threaten the foundations of democracy.”
Monck has not publicly revealed his plans for the future.
Davos Elites Cheer the Policies That Would Harm Those With the Least
By Chandre Dharma-wardana for Real Clear Markets
While eating caviar and sipping on fine wine, wealthy elites at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos hobnobbed with an assortment of academics, government leaders, and environmental activists to discuss their plans for a global transition in agricultural production. They all agreed that the conventional practices now feeding the world need to be scrapped and replaced by organic-style farming, which they claimed would help fight climate change and make food systems more secure.
They emphasized tying aid to the world’s 600 million smallholder farmers with efforts to “encourage” the adoption of organic methods, which they described with all the familiar buzzwords, such as “regenerative” and “sustainable. But the new fashion is “agroecology,” which not only prohibits modern pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and GMOs, but discourages mechanization as well.
One wonders if these entitled leaders took a momentary pause in their deliberations to consider the ongoing suffering and starvation in Sri Lanka, where past president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa took this kind of advice and bought into the fantasy of becoming the world’s first “fully organic and toxin free” nation.
Amid cheers from Davos-type eco-extremists, Rajapaksa proudly announced his plans at the 2021 Glasgow Climate Summit. Almost overnight, he banned agrochemicals and forced growers to adopt organic farming and become “in sync” with nature.
Shortly after in July 2022, Rajapaksa fled for his life amid mass protests and chaos as agricultural output dropped by 40%. Even today, more than 43% of children under five suffer from malnutrition there.
The Davos elites trumpet organic agriculture as the way to end food insecurity, even though it yields 35% less food per acre on average and could not possibly sustain the current population, let alone the almost 10 billion predicted by 2050. Their Swiss experts admit, and researchers confirm, that it cannot be scaled-up to feed even half the current world population.
In fact, every sustainability goal touted in Davos would be undermined by a shift to organic. Being 35% less productive means 50% more land needed to grow the same amount of food. Massively increasing farmland means cutting down forests and destroying habitat. That would devastate biodiversity and produce 50% to 70% more greenhouse gasses (GHGs).
Organic promoters should admit that organic farmers use lots of pesticides. They’re just older, less-targeted pesticides like copper sulfate, which are broadly toxic to humans and wildlife and must be used in greater amounts because they’re less effective.
Just weeks before the WEF at this year’s Conference of the Parties, a.k.a. the UN Convention on Climate Change in Egypt (COP27) and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal (COP15), leaders were singing the same bad tune, calling for “regenerative agriculture,” “sustainable intensification” and the word on everyone’s lips: “agroecology.”
This cocktail of sustainability terms is just unsustainable peasant farming rebottled, and these efforts are the bastard children of policymakers infected with activist-fed misinformation.
It’s not just that more land is needed for organic. GHG emissions are increased because farmers must till (plow) fields or flood them to control weeds, rather than use modern herbicides. Replacing 100kg of synthetic fertilizer requires 2-3 tons of organic compost, and organic manures made from farm waste contain phyto-accumulated heavy-metal toxins from soils, promoting dangerous runoff.
Conventional agriculture tripled farmland productivity between 1948 and 2019. Globally, it boosted cereal production over 300%. Though the cognoscenti pretend otherwise, conventional agriculture has adopted many truly regenerative practices. In no-till agriculture, farmers use herbicides, like atrazine and glyphosate, to control weeds instead of machine tilling.
Yes, atrazine and glyphosate reduce erosion and create higher-quality soil. They also reduce CO2 emissions by 280,000 metric tons and save 588 million gallons of diesel annually—equivalent to the emissions of 1 million cars. And, no, these herbicides are not bad for people and the environment. Atrazine does not leach into groundwater, as Health Canada showed in response to EU’s atrazine ban; and glyphosate does not cause cancer, as evidenced by the world’s largest and longest health study.
The wealthy elites steering the WEF and COP could make progress toward their laudable goals if they base their policies on such demonstrable facts, rather than fashionable organic fantasies.
Replacing 100kg of synthetic fertilizer requires 2-3 tons of organic compost, and organic manures made from farm waste contain phyto-accumulated heavy-metal toxins
Yet the pseudo-ecology haunting COP27, COP15, Davos and the EU channels the planet’s food security, biodiversity, and GHG mitigation efforts toward disaster, as Sri Lanka could attest.
So these leaders fly home on their greenhouse-gas-emitting jets, unaware or uncaring about the human and environmental damage their policies are promoting.
Now we know why there’s a HIGHWAY to HELL but only a STAIRWAY to HEAVEN.
The United Nations is releasing a report in June regarding the “perceived contradictions” between religious freedom and sexual orientation and gender identity, or SOGI, laws and is looking to push governments to “fully comply with their obligations under international human rights law to protect and empower LGBT+ persons,” according to a U.N. announcement.
The U.N. closed a call for LGBT and religious freedom organizations to submit input to the report earlier this month and is scheduled to introduce its findings at the 53rd Human Rights Council meeting in June, according to the announcement.
The announcement explains that while there are “perceived contradictions” between the LGBT community and religious freedom, the report aims to find ways to “protect LGBT+ persons’ access to faith and spirituality” while also indicating that religious beliefs that would contradict this are not “justified” under the protection of human rights.
“Religious and spiritual narratives have also historically been used to promote, enable, and condone institutional and personal violence and discrimination against individuals based on sexual orientation or gender identity (real or presumed); repress sexual and gender diversity; and promote cis-gendered and heteronormative norms of sexual orientation and gender identity,” the announcement read.
“These practices cannot be justified under the rubric of Freedom of Religious Beliefs, or indeed any other human right, to circumvent and defeat the rights of marginalized populations.”
he person in charge of the special report is Victor Madrigal-Borloz, an expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and a professor at Harvard Law School. Madrigal-Borloz has long been an LGBT advocate and recently welcomed Pope Francis’ declaration that homosexuality is “not a crime,” despite the pontiff’s further clarification that in religious circles it is still considered sinful.
Any organization that wished to comment for the inquiry was tasked with keeping their comments to a minimum of 2,5000 words and providing answers to 11 questions on religious freedom and the rights of the LGBT community, according to the announcement.
Respondents were asked whether or not any religious beliefs and LGBT rights were “mutually exclusive,” to point out policies that protect discriminatory religious practices and about the extent to which religious individuals have the right to a conscientious objection.
The U.N. didn’t disclose who commented ahead of the report’s release, but two organizations publicly published their comments for the inquiry, focusing on their concerns about the impact on the religious community. The Religious Freedom Institute and the Heritage Foundation’s comments worried that the special inquiry would “undermine” and result in the “politicization” of religious freedom as a human right.
“My biggest concern is the premise of the report which seems to suggest that freedom of religion and rights based on sexual orientation are the same,” Grace Melton, senior associate in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at Heritage, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“But certainly as a function of international law, they are not the same. Freedom of religion or belief, or freedom of conscience, is an internationally protected human right. It’s codified in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is a legally binding treaty.”
Melton further explained that she was “not terribly optimistic” that Madrigal-Borloz shared her views on the subject and warned that both domestic and international laws have become more and more antagonistic toward those who openly express their religious beliefs.
“Increasingly the U.S. has seen international law or U.N. opinions inform our own judicial opinions or even our own laws, regardless of whether or not that’s what the Founders intended,” Melton said. “So from the outset, to conflate those two things is concerning from somebody who is supposed to be a human rights expert.”
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, a fellow for the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, told the DCNF that she had similar worries, calling the report a “bold attack” and an attempt to try and “walk back the special protection” afforded to those with sincerely held religious beliefs.
“Despite saying that we shouldn’t have these rights pitted against one another, but when you keep reading on you see that the author of the report really does see [rights and religion] as being in conflict,” Picciotti-Bayer said.
“I think it’s important that the foundation of the question of human rights is that these are universally shared rights, that we share not by nature of any affinities but because of our humanity and the right to religious freedom … that’s a right that each and every human being possesses.”
Picciotti-Bayer said that efforts like the one from the U.N. are based on a “narrative” that “religion is an oppressor and that religious freedom can be weaponized to harm others.”
“This narrative is not only harmful because it could make people doubt the importance of religion in their own lives and their communities, but it’s also harmful because it will undermine really important social protection. Religion and religious freedom is a stabilizing presence, and for the cases where religion is being misused to oppress, the answer isn’t to shut down religion entirely.”
I t seems like the Progressive MSM and a few obscure websites are the only ones who know about Chinese balloons flown over our country during the Trump years.
EXCLUSIVE: Former President Trump and a number of his top national security and defense officials refuted Biden administration officials’ claims that Chinese surveillance balloons briefly transited the continental United States during the Trump administration, saying it “never happened.”
A defense official on Saturday said Chinese spy balloons briefly traveled over the United States at least three times during the last administration.
Chinese spy balloon flies above in Charlotte, North Carolina, Feb. 4, 2023. (Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
But Trump and his officials said that did not occur and criticized the Biden administration for spreading disinformation.
“This never happened. It would have never happened,” Trump told Fox News Digital on Sunday morning, adding that Beijing “respected us greatly” under his leadership.
“It never happened with us under the Trump administration and if it did, we would have shot it down immediately,” Trump said. “It’s disinformation.”
Former President Donald Trump (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump said the Biden administration is spreading this because “they look so bad, as usual.”
“They are incompetent,” he said.
Former Trump White House national security adviser John Bolton told Fox News Digital that he never heard of anything like this under his tenure.
“I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018,” Bolton said. “I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left either.”
Bolton said that if the Biden administration has “specific examples, they need to tell Congress.”
He added: “I can say with 100% certainty not during my tenure.”
Former national security adviser John Bolton gestures while speakings at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Sept. 30, 2019. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
Robert O’Brien, who served as White House national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, told Fox News Digital that he had no knowledge of anything like this occurring.
“Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue,” O’Brien said, telling Fox News Digital that his team, which included Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser, and Allison Hooker, who served as senior adviser to Asia, also were not briefed on these activities.
National security adviser Robert O’Brien talks with reporters before boarding Air Force One. (AP)
Former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, who led the intelligence community at the onset of COVID, told Fox News Digital that he did “one of the biggest intelligence deep dives on China, their spying and the origins of COVID” during his tenure.
“It never came up,” he said. “If a balloon had come up, we would have known. Someone in the intelligence community would have known, and it would have bubbled up to me to brief the president.”
And former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who lead ODNI after Grenell and through the end of the Trump administration, also refuted the claim.
“It’s not true. I can refute it,” Ratcliffe said on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “The American people can refute it for themselves. Do you remember during the Trump administration, when photographers on the ground and commercial airline pilots were talking about a spy balloon over the United States that people could look up and see, even with the naked eye, and that a media that hated Donald Trump wasn’t reporting?”
He added: “I don’t remember that either, because it didn’t happen.”
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell attends the “Rally for Equal Rights at the United Nations (Protesting Anti-Israeli Bias)” in Geneva, Switzerland, March 18, 2019. (Reuters/Denis Balibouse)
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia Heino Klinck told Fox News Digital that he also was unaware.
“I can’t rule out that things occurred that I was unaware of, but I do think something like this, I would have been aware of,” Klinck said.
Former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper also said he was never told about Chinese surveillance balloons above the United States during his time at the Pentagon.
“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” Esper said during an appearance on CNN. “I would remember that for sure.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper speaks to members of the media during a news conference at the Pentagon in Washington, on March 23, 2020. (Army Staff Sgt. Nicole Mejia/Department of Defense via AP)
And former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, who had previously served as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, also told Fox News he never had heard of a Chinese spy balloon while he was in government.”
“Never heard a whisper and I have to think if anything like that happened that would have been a huge issue,” Miller told Fox News Digital. “No. Absolutely never heard of anything like that while I was in government or at the Pentagon.”
It is unclear, at this point, if these activities did take place, and if it was military leadership that chose not to brief civilian leadership on the matter.
But a senior administration official told Fox News Digital on Sunday that “U.S. intelligence, not the Biden administration, but U.S. intel assesses PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental U.S. briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.”
“They went undetected.And this is part of a larger pattern: These balloons are all part of a PRC fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations, which have also violated the sovereignty of other countries,” the official said. “These kinds of activities are often undertaken at the direction of the People’s Liberation Army.”
“Over the past several years, Chinese balloons have previously been spotted over countries across five continents, including in East Asia, South Asia, and Europe,” the official said.
The official added: “Two things can be true at once: this happened and it wasn’t detected.”
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
The balloon was shot down on Saturday off the coast of South Carolina, after traveling for days over the continental United States.
Senior defense officials said Saturday was the first time the U.S. had the chance to shoot down the balloon over water. Officials could have shot the balloon down over Montana and northern U.S. states, but out of an abundance of caution, chose to wait until it was transiting over water to prevent any risk to civilians or civilian property.
The military and intelligence community recovery efforts are underway. Fox News has learned that the FBI will play a role in the recovery efforts, and debris could be brought to Quantico for review.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter.